"Does Blantyre know?"
"He knew she was born, nothing more."
"We were married secretly."
"And after all he has done, and left undone, you want to try and save him now?"
He was thinking that she still loved the man. "That offscouring!" he said to himself. "Well, women beat all! He treats her like a Patagonian; leaves her to drift with his child not yet born; rakes the hutches of the towns and the kraals of the veld for women—always women, black or white, it didn't matter; and yet, by gad, she wants him back!"
She seemed to understand what was passing in his mind. Rising, with a bitter laugh which he long remembered, she looked at him for a moment in silence, then she spoke, her voice shaking with scorn:
"You think it is love for him that prompts me now?" Her eyes blazed, but there was a contemptuous laugh at her lips, and she nervously pulled at the tails of her sable muff. "You are wrong—absolutely. I would rather bury myself in the mud of the Thames than let him touch me. Oh, I know what his life must have been—the life of him that you know! With him it would either be the sewer or the sycamore-tree of Zaccheus; either the little upper chamber among the saints or eating husks with the swine. I realize him now. He was easily susceptible to good and evil, to the clean and the unclean; and he might have been kept in order by some one who would give a life to building up his character; but his nature was rickety, and he has gone down and not up."
"Then why try to save him? Let Oom Paul have him. He'll do no more harm, if—"
"Wait a minute," she urged. "You are a great man"—she came close to him—"and you ought to understand what I mean, without my saying it. I want to save him for his own sake, not for mine—to give him a chance. While there's life there's hope. To go as he is, with the mud up to his lips—ah, can't you see! He is the father of my dead child. I like to feel that he may make some thing of his life and of himself yet. That's why I haven't tried to divorce him, and—"
"If you ever want to do so—" he interrupted, meaningly.